Mirantis to tap into Asian OpenStack goldmine with Chinese funding

Consultancy startup say Dell, Intel and WestSummit funding round will be used for development and growing China presence

OpenStack has a big year ahead. The drive to entice
vendors towards the cloud infrastructure project continues, but now
it’s a case of which long-standing member will push hardest with an
OpenStack solution in the coming months.

Dell and Intel believe the time to move is now, uniting to
pump $10m into fellow OpenStack Foundation member, Mirantis, who
help firms deploy OpenStack clouds based on vanilla source code.
The funding round from their investment arms (Dell Ventures and
Intel Capital), alongside Chinese company WestSummit Capital should
help pave the way to get their upcoming public cloud products into
the enterprise environment.

Service integrator Mirantis has already built up an
impressive pedigree in its three year tenure. An early OpenStack
advocate and code contributor, the startup boasts 30 OpenStack
deployments at companies such asHewlett-Packard,
NASA, PayPal and AT&T.In a press release, Mirantis say “the
investment will be used to accelerate Mirantis’ growth in the
OpenStack market.”

The Registersaymuch of that will go
toward “expanding R&D” notably the development of a library of
pre-packaged OpenStack deployment and management APIs, which
Mirantis may pursue as a commercial option later on separately. It
alsoplans toup its OpenStack
involvement, with 15 paid engineers (up from 4) set to work on the
project through the course of 2013.

With WestSummit’s partnership, Mirantis are in the ideal spot
to tackle the OpenStack untapped goldmine that is the Asia-Pacific,
specifically China. A recent Beijing OpenStack summit drew 1,000
attendees, nearly on a par with the official Grizzly Design Summit
in October, suggesting the appetite for the technology in the
country is great.

Mirantis already hold close tieswiththe two tech giants, helping Intel build out its public cloud
and contributing to Dell’s open source cloud installer Crowbar.
Dell intended to releaseitsOpenStack
distribution at the end of 2012, before pushing it to the end of
this year, hinting that maturity might be some time off
yet.

Despite this alliance, Mirantis says it “will remain true to
its focus of providing a vendor-neutral implementation of
OpenStack, free of lock-in hooks or proprietary
packaging.”

Despite offering tools and components to the OpenStack
puzzle, Mirantis’s goal isn’t to compete with the heavyweights with
its own distribution. Mirantis’s consultancy role could prove
pivotal in deciding which distro comes out on top. Its
expertise and talent pool are in high demand, as vendors seek
advisors in joining up OpenStack’s myriad of components together in
a strong proprietary solution.